Efficient argumentation can be equally attained through verbal, nonverbal and paraverbal means. Whenever the skilled and skilful rhetorician looks for some immediate and tricky effect on the audience, he employs the above-mentioned means in such a way that even the fallacious discourse may be perceived, by the unexperienced, as valid one. The paper draws attention to strategies of the sort as identified in the present-day political discourse.

Current research on the risks associated with mobile phone suggests that many European citizens, at least in the developed countries, have negative perceptions of mobile phone base stations technologies and perceive different health risks associated with the proximity of mobile phone base stations. Less research has been conducted in the East European countries regarding risk perceptions on electromagnetic fields. In the current research study we conducted a content analysis of news regarding mobile phone technology in Romania – mobile phone masts and mobile phone radiations, using two of the most important news portals (www.hotnews.ro and www.ziare.com). A systematic search was …

The paper represents an advocacy for refining the speaker’s discursive strategies, in order to apprehensively open (in a gesture of semiotic decency) the Romanian imaginary dowry. Making appropriate, natural, choices, avoiding arrogances or vulgar ironies are the challenges to be undertaken in the current political discourse. I believe the analysis of certain metaphoric processes, symmetries and semantic paradoxes – from a semiotic and metaphor theory perspective – can provide insight within the speakers’ skills, within the symbolic representations conveyed in the construction of messages and within the power struggle negotiation. I have observed the deciphering of the metaphorical mechanism, the …

Starting from the social representation theories, our paper proposes to identify some typologies of the leader in the current Romanian public space. The aim of this paper is to associate these typologies with the way citizens perceive and appreciate their leaders. According to Abric “representation is a guide for action, orienting facts and social relations, a pre-codified system of reality as it determines a set of anticipations and expectations” (Abric, 1994: 13). Viewed as forms of symbolization and interpretation, expression and construction, the social representations attributed to the leaders recompose and redefine the social reality determining changes at the level …

The aim of my paper is to path the way to further debates on the blueprint of an aesthetical epistemology, that is, of a theory of knowledge at whose hearts lies the visual image. My thesis is that visual images are the real “engine room” of representations; appearing as unconscious “items”, phantasms, “guiding-images”, or as “clips”, they decide what is happening at the first level of knowledge, the one of representations. Implicitly, the visual images influence ideologies, as well as scientific theories. That’s the reason why I consider visual images as having a strategic place in a culture: they are …

Advertisers, as keen observers of reality, pay very much attention to how their messages are delivered. Being aware that people feel happier with the idea of foods that are natural rather than synthetic, they use common language so as to mean something to the consumer. Having a limited amount of space in order to try to capture the potential consumer’s attention, an advertiser will always make conventional usage more attractive. For this purpose he will highlight the product’s quality by making associations between the product and something that already possesses the characteristics he needs to claim for the product. This …

Conventionally, translation depends on the western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge. Reality is seen as something unproblematic, ‘out there’; knowledge involves a representation of this reality; and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality. Moreover, the notion of representation has played an important place in the study of culture. Representation links meaning and language to culture. Many have asked themselves: “What does representation have to do with culture and meaning?” In answering this question, we gathered a number of samples from the Romanian literature and attempted to translate them into English.

This paper is part of an international project that works on (young) adults’ reflections on their own language learning and use, presented under the form of language autobiographies. The project aims at depicting manners of eliciting language autobiographies and of analysing them with the ultimate purpose of developing different methods and tools for both teaching and learning languages. The paper intends to offer an example of analysis of a language autobiography, concentrating on the subject’s representations of language learning events seen from the perspective of the self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985: 45).

Hotel World is a very rich novel which reveals to the readers complex aspects connected to time, space, language, relationships, discourse. The aspect on which we intend to focus – the space of the hotel as a reflective construct of postmodernity – is announced from the very title and it delineates a specific type of reading through the motif introduced in it. Thus, the reader is plunged in the depths of the novel (as the main character plunges through the hotel shaft) and is taken on a journey in which he discovers numerous interpretations and implications of space and spatiality.

Most of the literary pieces which bear the mark of magical realism can also be described as postcolonial as long as they are set in a postcolonial context and challenge the assumptions of a dominant and authoritative colonialist attitude towards history, reality or truth. The development of English magical realist writing in the latter half of the twentieth century overlaps with the birth and growth of postcolonial theory and criticism in a great deal. As the most famous magical realist writer in English, Salman Rushdie admits to having been influenced by both the surrealist European tradition and the mythic branch …

Published initially in 1855 in the first edition of “Leaves of Grass” and re-published in 1856 under the title “Poem of the Body”, “I Sing the Body Electric” creates a triadic representation/image of the Body – as erotic, political and poetic. All of these images converge to re-create the historical body – the body that completes the historic landscape of America and represents the unfolding history of democracy, bearing the symbol/scar of race, gender, class: the manly, working body, the birthing and nurturing body, the sensual body, the matriarchal and patriarchal body, the body of the master, and that of …

The close relationship that can be established between poetry and painting may be studied in the evolution of the concept of ekphrasis, a Greek rhetorical term originally used to refer to a descriptive passage in writing. In recent times, however, the meaning of the term has narrowed gradually, being limited, first, to visual descriptions and then to the description of a real or imagined work of visual art. In this paper, we focus on the ways in which ekphrastic poems simultaneously depend on and enhance the life of the paintings by which they are inspired. This is a process by …

Following the work of Freud, psychoanalysis reveals an unconscious state the characters in a fiction may develop. We have decided to study a gothic vampire short story by Sheridan Le Fanu: Carmilla. Horror fiction can be considered as a projection in a heavily codified form of deeply instinctual drives. In Carmilla, we will first study the dream dimension as the main action occurs at night. Then, the character of Carmilla may be opposed to reality because she belongs to the realms of fantasy and monstrosity. She has then the appropriate quality for enjoying desire outside the law, outside the symbolic, …

Our paper attempts to draw the connection between representations of hunger in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre and the reality of Victorian times regarding the differentiated consumption of food by members belonging to different social classes. Hunger will be approached as embodying the idea of threat, in relation to all the Victorian social classes. The deeper analysis will try to identify the functions of images of hunger in Victorian fiction, respectively social criticism and realism. Our analysis will rely on textual support provided by Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre.

This paper parallels the Victorian novel Jane Eyre (1847) and different fairy tales due to similar motifs and symbols. Our paper compares common themes between the two types of narratives; the emphasis falls on: miserable childhood, oppressive families, patriarchal societies, presence of an ally, the ultimate happy ending next to a Prince Charming. Later on, the focus shifts on the differences between them among which we can mention: the different interest in fashion and appearance, different types of Prince Charming, different expectations in life. And finally we were interested in portraying the Victorian epoch in which Charlotte Brontë’s novel is …

My article’s topic regards the role of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy in the theoretical clarification of symbol and symbolic function, and also his contribution to the psychology of religion. This contribution is made possible by the author’s extensive theoretical considerations about interpretation, hermeneutics and the phenomenology of religion. My approach here aims at underlining also the author’s unity of thinking through time, in all the connected issues, in his various writings.

Taking into account the fact that travelling and culture exist in a dependent relationship or that travelling is an attempt to quench one’s thirst for knowledge, travelling becomes a source of intellectual or spiritual enlightenment and a means of cultural contact and exchange. On this background, this paper discusses the travelling experience of Marcu Beza (1882–1949), a little known essayist, poet, prose writer, literary critic, folklorist, translator, and diplomat of Aromanian origin. A follower of Nicolae Iorga or Ion Codru-Drăguşanu, he travelled to Englandat the beginning of the twentieth century and his travel accounts represent valuable insights into the English …

According to the Japanese mythology, there are two views of the universe: one vertical and one horizontal. The vertical world points to a three-layered universe: Takamagahara (Plain of High Heaven), Ashihara no Nakatsu kuni (Central Land of Reed Plains) and Yomi no kuni (Land of Darkness). The topography of Yomi can be inferred from Izanagi’s trip to the Land of Darkness to see his deceased wife, a tale similar to that of Orpheus and Eurydice. This two-dimensional view belongs to the folk beliefs in Tokoyo (The Eternal Land), an imaginary realm in Japanese mythology, generally conceived as a world beyond …

The rights of the minorities to assert the individuality of their own cultures, is now flourishing in various forms in the United-States. These newly empowered minorities may also be led to display the hegemonic tendencies generally exhibited by the established culture. Thus, cultural independence cannot be preserved for the subordinate, racial or ethnic minorities under the dominant white culture, because society is always structured in dominance. There is, at least, structural inequality based on race or ethnicity (Billington, 1993:87-99). Dominant culture brings threat of inequality based on the minority in this sense. The cultural devices of American subordinate, ethnic, native …

Antonin Artaud, with his Theatre of Cruelty, proposes a return to the origin of man and culture where it is clear the relationship between life and art. The art and life should not be separated because they form a unit. Artaud explains this unit through the total image of the hieroglyph man: a body that is not longer a human body defined by their physiological functions, but a body ready to become a sign, to become a communicative body at all. The theatre is the place where the hieroglyph man can become a sign and contaminate the public. The spectator is touched …

The fact that the theatre is inconceivable in the absence of a stage actor, it’s an indisputable reality till the fifties’ theatre. Responsible of the incarnation of the character, the comedian’s body was sometimes a simple support of the dramatic speech, of the theatrical voice, sometimes place of exhibition or, on the contrary, concealing the flesh. More or less faithful to the stage directions, imitating reality (naturalist drama ) or, on the contrary, stripped of reality to acquire the attributes of a puppet (in the setting of the symbolist stage), the body has always been an area of spectacular work …

This article tries to analyze some examples of the state of symbolic process, representation and desacralization by referring to contemporary feminist performance artists from Latin America: la Congelada de Uva (Mexico) and Ana Mendieta (Cuba). We are interested, in particular, by the use of the death and by the simulation of funeral rituals by those performers of two different decades (1970 for Mendieta and 2000 for Boliver). We attempt to analyse de performatives characteristics among feminist art and its transgressing attempts of the body, but also the rejection of the social-imposed image of female body. The role of the body …

Tattooing is an art form that has been used for thousands of years everywhere around the world. Mummies dated as far back as the 3rd and the 4th centuries have been found with tattoos on their arms, legs and backs – including the women. In Caesarian myths for example, Bretons were described as being tattooed. Judged to be a pagan ritual, tattooing was ended around the 7th century on religious grounds, thus attributing for the first time a negative connotation. It was only during the fourteenth century that the tattoo re-emerged on the European continent, courtesy of James Cook’s explorations. …

For occidental cultures, scientific medicine has become, socially and symbolically, famous and renowned. The discipline may be founded on rationality; it also embodies a strong mythical dimension, extensively seen in publicity, literature and arts. According to us, the attention given to technical and scientific (technoscientific) imaginary is one of the major trends characterizing occidental culture. In particular, the transformations to the human body, made easy by consistently evolving techniques, are widely represented by contemporary literature. Nevertheless, these modern representations of medical (surgical) operations refer to cultural and mythical legacy. In this paper, we aim at identifying a part of this …

The aim of this article is to make visible the challenge that intersexuality poses to representation. We will analyze the memoirs of Herculine Barbin who was an intersex person living in Paris in the 19th century. We will put it into the context of the history of monstrosity, pathology and normality whose development marked the 18th and 19th centuries. In addition, we will discuss the representation of the ambiguous body in the planches of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia and photographs of Felix Nadar. The relationships between the images (drawings and photographs) and their descriptions together compose a kind of medical …

We know that the catoptromancy concerns all the techniques of divination by reflective surfaces. Well, in his Perspective curieuse from 1638, Jean-François Nicéron regrets that, in some cases, the prodigious effects of the catoptrics are used in abusive way inside such practices. Based on mathematic principles of perspective, this illusionist art tries to give a signification to an informal representation, in the aim to reconstruct the deliberately distort image, by means of a phantomlike reflection. When, in the end of his Italian period, French painter Simon Vouet realizes a sanguine drawing, representing a catoptric device, he becomes the ambassador of …

Blanchot, on one hand, Magritte and de Chirico, on the other, like intermediate spaces connected through an interaction relationship, are own ways in dealing with a Resemblance detached from the resemblances, a resemblance driven by the imperative of connection, engaging network connections where Blanchot, Magritte and de Chirico as nodes become similar.

The literature universe of Georges Bataille is originated on the base of the negation which rises from Nietzsche’s concept of the death of the God and from the subsequent uncertainty which means the decomposition of the subjectivity of man. Bataille tries the carnavalesque subversion of the reality, the exteriorization of phantasms and also seeks new possibilities of the transcendence. This transcendence is labeled as «the inner experience»: it is possible to reach it through the excess and sexuality. According to the specific principle of his thinking and the situation of the narration in the border of the neurosis, Bataille’s work …

Anne Cunéo is a Swiss writer, with a rich experience in cinema and television. The book which consecrated her as a novelist is Le trajet d’une rivière (1993), a seducing novel which invites the reader to discover Francis Tregian as a stereotypical image of the Renaissance humanist. Inspired from reality, this character surprises by his life built beyond conventions, taking the form of a long exile. He aims at a freedom of the conscience which he can only reach in his passion for music. Anne Cunéo fills her novel with the musical images populating Francis Tregian’s inner life, images that he …

We interviewed Ermanno Cavazzoni and when we defined the Federico Fellini’s movie La voce della luna as an adaptation of his novel, Il poema dei lunatici, the writer seemed to disagree with such a definition. We can define this “praise of folly” the result of an intense collaboration between the two artists who from the very beginning who established a deep connection from the very beginning. Like in the oneiric process, Fellini developed all the images proposed by the book. Some scenes, like the capture of the moon, were the results of conversations between Fellini and Cavazzoni. Fellini decided to …